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Better Living Through Suicide

Religions tend to set limits. Those limits come with the force of God or some spiritual force that transcends man. Otherwise, a religion would be nothing more than man-made rules enforced by the strongest. This is why laws in most of the world are rooted in the dominant religion of the region or country. The local religion is a list of restrictions and limitations placed on the believers. Naturally, when it came time to form a government and write laws, they relied upon the laws and rules of their religion.

This may seem rather obvious, but the concept of the limiting principle is easy to take for granted. This is a core feature of most religions and it easiest to understand by considering our laws. Take two people who are not robbing banks. Just as long as both are not robbing banks, neither is more or less of a bank robber than the other. Both are simply not bank robbers. In other words, while there may be degrees of bank robbery, there are no degrees of not bank robbery. Not being one is the limit of that virtue.

This is true of religion, of course. The sinner can be someone breaking a minor rule or someone violating the big rules. Their degree of sinfulness can be established, but their degree of virtue does not exist. If you are not violating the rules of the faith, then that is as good as it gets for you, at least in this life. In other words, there is a limit to virtue. That limit is the rule or prohibition. You are either within the rules or not. Efforts to out-virtue others are usually seen as vanity, unjustified boasting about one’s spiritual state.

The limiting principle keeps religions and the law from going crazy and descending into virtue spirals. After all, if one can be more virtuous than the next guy, then the next guy can be even more virtuous. The cycle ends only when everyone is dead. The same is true of the law. Utopian schemes like communism are aimed at constructing the perfect society, but since perfection is impossible, it is a never ending cycle of madness to make society better, which means making people better. It’s why they always end in violence.

This has always been the problem with efforts to create a civic religion. Robespierre and his radical buddies figured this out quickly, which is why they came up with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Of course, their new reason cult got weird in hurry and contributed to the demise of Robespierre. The reason is any effort to invest moral authority in men or their creations turns those men into gods. The madness of the French Revolution was a virtue spiral, as there was no transcendent limit. The radicals could always be more radical.

We see this with the nature movements that have been a feature of the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The greens always aim for some sort of Edenic outcome. Their goal always lies just a little further. The idea of “good enough” is outside their comprehension. Couple that with their preternatural belief in the sinfulness of man and you end up with a nature cult that borders on being a suicide cult. The end point of every Progressive nature movement is the end of mankind.

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Just look at that list. It sounds like a combination of the Shakers and 1970’s new age mysticism. In order to save the planet, according to researchers and experts no less, is to avoid having more humans and make the ones waiting around to die as miserable as possible. The unspoken reason for selling the car and sitting in the dark with your nothing burger is so you can suffer and atone for your sins. In other words, it is not enough to be a green, you have to kill yourself as the ultimate sign of your virtue.

This is not new. The Shakers, obviously, are an example of what happens when a religion cannot imagine a limit to virtue. The Shakers, though, had the decency to mind their own business and not try to inflict themselves on the rest of the world. In the long run, they were a slow-motion suicide cult, but they were willing to let nature take its course. The modern nature cults not only want to rush their demise, they want to take the rest of us with them, or at least make us suffer for their religion.

This is the problem that has haunted the Left in America. There’s no concept of good enough. They are always chanting, “we can do more” or “there is more work to do.” No matter how much damage they do in the holy cause, they are sure that more needs doing, more must be done. It’s why their causes tend to burn out in fits of insanity like we see with the whole transgender thing. The quest for the ultimate victim has led them to celebrate mental illness as a virtue and deny biological reality.

There’s another point here worth mentioning. A reason Progressives lack the concept of the limiting principle is that the modern American Left grew out of the postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century. This was an American Protestant movement based on the belief that the time between now and the end times would be one where the Church came to dominate the nations of the earth and usher in an era of peace, prosperity and righteousness, signally the return of Christ. Abolitionism was a product of this movement.

Modern Progressives have abandoned the language of Christianity, but they retain the characteristics and much of the language of their spiritual forebears. Instead of spreading the Word, they spread democracy. Instead of defeating Satan by expanding the kingdom of God on earth, the modern Progressives expands the inclusive Community to defeat the Hate. Saving the earth is, in a way, the restoration of Eden. When the goal is to immanentize the eschaton, it is no wonder they set no limits for themselves.

I second the Peterson recommendations. There are any number of short clips to choose from, but perhaps the best intro is the first three hour Joe Rogan interview of him because it covers all the bases and it blew Rogan’s proggie mind as well. Peterson is the most prepared fellow I have yet heard.

Some of Petersons bedst interview are not on his channel but on others. His interview with Gad Saad on Gads channel is good. In the 2.part 31.min in he talks of the influence and importance of IQ. He is elegant because he don´t touch race. He says nobody wants to talk about the data in IQ research because it will open up for a debat that can´t be handled. Here he talks about marxism and post-modernism and political correctness in interview.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ

19th century science, especially Darwinism, torpedoed traditional Christianity. The Smart Set (who never liked that whole Church thing anyway) jumped ship to Idealism and Socialism. Now that 21st century science is torpedoing traditional Socialism, where can they go? I was 75% joking when I suggested what they need is a good old fashioned Flagellant movement, but I’m joking less and less every day.

Further to this, Christians are enjoined to practice acts of virtue in private, as far as possible: do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, give alms in secret, go into your room to pray, spruce yourself up so that no-one knows you’re fasting, etc. But since humans are prone to virtue signal regardless, societies have usually found it necessary to create a clerical caste, to whom is reserved the task of holiness and moral exhortation. The mother of all holiness spirals (until the present day) was perhaps the Anabaptist revolt following the Reformation, and… Read more »

He learned the game from his father. Al Gore Sr. got rich with Armand Hammer (of Occidental Petroleum fame) basically selling defective bull semen and tainted meat (which, to be fair, is still a higher quality commodity than the bull his son is selling). Google “Al Gore Sr.” and “Armand Hammer,” if you don’t know the story. It’s quite illuminating.

I think there is a simpler explanation for the insane behavior of the Left. If you are a parasite, you have to be crazy in order to defend the continuation and expansion of parasitism via recruitment. Eventually you will overwhelm and kill the host, hence the suicide endpoint for all. And if they keep yakking loudly, the host may wake up and decide its time to do something about the parasites. This is why tyranny of the majority will always lead to extinction.

I have noticed that the Dems are always “fighting” for something. 15 bucks an hour, gender equity in paychecks, and so on. Always a “fight” for this, or “fighting” for that. Bicycle lock man and some Antifa morons notwithstanding, all of this “fighting” from a bunch of navel-gazing greenies has always seemed just weird to me.

Christianity always had the various corporal and spiritual acts of mercy (almsgiving, visiting the sick, time spent in prayer, etc) as the next level beyond mere avoidance of sin. Before the reformation, Christianity also had a bonus level of a self-martyrdom-lite, as the Shakers here mentioned: the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (monks/nuns). i would submit that the acts-of-mercy tier is compatible with any great civilizational model: the ancient Greek love of brothers, the Roman sense of patriotism (pro patria mori), etc. The radical self-abnegation of refusing to reproduce cannot be supported by any more than a tiny… Read more »

Fine post. I will say the current low rates of reproduction really aren’t Caused by Leftists virtue signaling or some deep set belief we’ve reached the limits of physical carrying capacity Most people don’t live that malarkey and making it leave the public sphere won’t help much The decline is mostly by wages v. housing costs Wages are down by half (as percent GDP) from 1973 and housing is up dramatically. my boyhood home costs about 10x what it did in the 1970’s according to Zillow (two homes, $30,000) Thus basic housing costs as 10x what they used to be… Read more »

You’ll get some down votes for that mainly because pro natalist people in general like babies but fear trying to build an economic system that allows people a decent income. A lot of them like the elite assumes society is entitled to people making sacrifices to have more children for the common good while they do not. The rich get a new Bugatti, the poor eat ramen have the babies If I work hard with some skill and there isn’t enough income to meet my needs as a working man and my families while the elite get rich and I… Read more »

The left has based it’s power in the moral fight of the 60s equal rights movement, but they’ve run out of victims. This has all been one long quest to either keep minorities victims or find new victim classes. If they can’t do that then they might actually have to have some type of policy.

While there is a historical thread between New England Puritanism and the Progressives of 100 years ago, their old heresy that God needs man’s help to accomplish His purposes is not new. The even more blatant heresy that we see in today’s Progs (and many others) is that men can compel God (now redefined as History in their theology) through their own actions. One theological problem with easily calling this heresy out is that scripture is pretty clear that sometimes God _does_ work through human agents, but He is always the principal directing the action. And, should some human agent… Read more »

I´m afraid it is not exactly correct to say that a religion cannot have a virtue spiral. Early Christianity had it (all those saints on a column, self-castration by a zealous church father and many other examples). What about flagellants, starting in the Middle Ages and existing to this day? The sitting Pope is also a case at point, sort of. Actually, the Eastern Orthodox Church, especially in Russia, has all this preserved and active. No wonder the Russian folk mentalatiy, which most often strikes a curious visitor from the West as idiotic and kinky, exists under the influence of… Read more »

Whatever. I am seeing a resurgence of Christianity round here, especially in young people. They’ve seen too many single moms, divorced derelict fathers, and pan-gendered freak shows and they know the jig is up. These new age nutters are never happy and if anything, their substitutes for religion and family values is leaving them worse off and unhappier. This is the problem with the LBGTQFUCKMYANUS crowd – they can’t produce families, much less communities. When they converge a business or organization it invariably dies. The wheels are coming off their bus because now they’re hitting us in the pocket books… Read more »

Unfortunately, “resurgence of Christianity, especially in young people” is by far the most frequent statement I was running across in texts on the modern role of religion, for VERY LONG YEARS. While wave after wave of reported “interest of the young in religion” came and went, the pews kept getting emptier. Apparently, each promising (churchwise) generation of young people was able to take interest in other things after dabbing shortly in the Jesus thing. And one should not blame them. All three Desert Cults are part of the West’s problem, not its solution. This blog, by the way, takes a… Read more »

Mppffff. I would say the NRx crowd is pretty much discredited at this point. The alt-right is looking good for now; who knows where it will be 5 years from now. Regardless, neither of those ideologies have provisions for building viable communities. The alt-right can’t even define itself in a way that is consistent with all members. Already a holiness spiral is setting up in the alt-right too: watch the peasantry swarm anyone they perceive as a “cuck”. The alt-right also has its own phonies and virtue signallers too. These faults are a product of human nature IMO, and so… Read more »

Objection Your Honor!
The confession that “stresses family, community, morality, charity and responsibility, humbleness and self improvement” is called Confucianism and is entirely unrelated to the Jesus Christ followship. Christianity, on the other hand, is a hoax that (((our mutual friends))) once invented for the goyim, while staying comfortably outside it themselves. And no religion can escape a DNA like this, in the same way as homans cannot escape theirs.

There is another factor with the eco-Nazis. They lead miserable lives of course, If everything crashes and there’s a die off, they will no longer have to make decisions about how to live. I had one get ticked off when I told her that we would blow the high bridge to keep out the city folks, if things fell apart. This woman, in Missouri, proceeded to tell me that people from Portland would come up and cut down all the woods if we did that. I thought about how they used to take down trees, pre chainsaw, and still think… Read more »

The larger point is true-Progs came from Protestants, via a gnostic-type heresy.

I disagree with this:

>Their degree of sinfulness can be established, but their degree of virtue does not exist. If you are not violating the rules of the faith, then that is as good as it gets for you, at least in this life

The suicidal thing is an expression of the gnosticism buried in Christianity’s DNA. A much earlier expression was the Albigensian Heresy. They were also anti-natalist, and their elite would kill themselves through purposefully inducing pneumonia.

Sure, but what are the degrees of prudence? Hoe about chastity? We tend to say things like “She is moderately chaste” because it will be taken as sarcasm. That’s because you’re either chaste or not. In Christianity, at least, virtue is a condition, while sin is a spectrum. Put another way, virtue is static, while sin is dynamic. In the Prog theology, virtue is a the graph of 1/x.

Yeah-negative commandments (shalt nots ) are binary. Either you do or you don’t. We also have fences around them-restrictions so that you don’t unintentionally violate the core prohibition. Positive commandments-some have limitations, some don’t. You’re not supposed to give more than a fifth of your money to charity, unless you are very well off. On the other hand, there is no upper limit on kindness (properly construed). Etc. What makes Progressivism so awful is three things. First, they have no god and no scripture, so everything is arbitrary status games. Second, they have that Gnostic anti-life thing you pointed out.… Read more »

EPA auto emissions requirements are probably the ultimate virtue signaling medium. Eric Peters Autos blog often goes into the absurd, ever increasing emission requirements. With modern computer controlled mixtures and catalytic converters, cars are nearly 100% stoichiometrically efficient. So .0001% pollution is now too much, next year it needs to be .000001%. These requirements have diminishing and/or even negative returns. Now they’ve seized on the ultimate con, CO2. CO2 is a renewable waste product and ultimate plant food. Each gallon of hydrocarbon fuel produces about 20 lbs of CO2. This is simple physical chemistry. It cannot be abated. So now… Read more »

The whole Green revolution is obviously about public expression rather than deed, which makes it not just a religion, but a religion where hypocrites thrive and the pious suffer for the hypocrisy of their betters. Jeff Bezos can write an op-ed about how Trump doesn’t care about the climate, while also perfecting how to use a mob of unmanned aerial drones to ensure his customers don’t have to wait more than twelve hours for their DVDs and hot sauce. Great conservationist, he is. Reading the Sierra Club’s “Dirty Deals” report on TPP, it’s obvious that Trump has done more to… Read more »

Cycle of madness, or a prison march to utopia. It’s scary how much present day prisons mirror the perfect progressive society: everyone is equal, minorities outnumber whites, only the authorities have guns, free bad health care and most important of all; In prison there is only ghay marriage, everyone is ghay for the say! And like some Christian denominations they are big into flagellation: “Mortification of the flesh is an act by which an individual or group seeks to mortify, or put to death, their sinful nature, as a part of the process of sanctification. In Christianity, common forms of… Read more »

[…] Just look at that list. It sounds like a combination of the Shakers and 1970’s new age mysticism. In order to save the planet, according to researchers and experts no less, is to avoid having more humans and make the ones waiting around to die as miserable as possible. The unspoken reason for selling the car and sitting in the dark with your nothing burger is so you can suffer and atone for your sins. In other words, it is not enough to be a green, you have to kill yourself as the ultimate sign of your virtue. […]

After the Prog Proles start having less kids, the next effort by the Prog Chiefs will be to get them to start killing themselves. Once that gets going free men and women-the Dirt People-will be targeted for extermination. That’s when the hot civil war begins.

I’d respectfully say we are past the 1) have less kids 2) suicide, “white death” is humming right along 3) Dirt People, at least the whites, have openly been targeted for extermination, with those in the institutions gleefully cheering this on. While I realize everything is based upon degrees, and we probably have quite a few levels to go before we go from this cold civil war to a hot one, I’m not fully convinced this future event is so terribly far away, at all. As the Proggie desperation & impatience increases, along with their ever-growing kinship with radical Islam,… Read more »

the situation is already self-correcting. universities have started moving against the crazies as the money coming in starts to be affected (as it has). if you turn the money off, the craziness will go away. right now the biggest source of funding for insanity is the government — which will soon run out of funds. so i don’t see a hot civil war, i see federal collapse and local control returning to the states. as Zman discusses in this post, the left in general has lost their cloak of moral authority, and without it they are powerless. they will be… Read more »

In Claremont (my alma mater) they finally stood up and busted three student ringleaders of a recent contratemps. Why? Because the alumni have absolutely and completely turned off the flow of donations. Simple cause and effect. Karl is exactly right on this.

You are right to condemn the utopian urge to be “holier than thou,” but not all your examples are apt. Overpopulation is also a form of social suicide, and trying to prevent it is not necesssarily virtue exhibitionism.

Some people are quite correctly upset that lefty environmental groups want population stabilization only for white people, but that doesn’t mean the principle of limiting reproduction to what the earth — and quality of life — can bear is mistaken. We should prioritize population stabilization where it is most needed (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa).

Who will decide what mother nature can bare?
The same people who decide what hate is?

We lack civilization, not raw resources.
Which poses a problem for 2 or 20 million.

Also we can hardly speak of overpopulation when only 10-20% of the world’s land mass is even populated by humans and the current 7 billion earthlings are better fed than the 1 billion 100 years ago were, how does that fit into your theory? You are less likely to starve today than any other time in history.

This is the other Guest. That is complete rubbish. Without the Haber-Bosch process to manufacture Ammonia from atmospheric Nitrogen and Norman Borlaug’s work to produce hybrid plant breeds the Earth’s population would never have surpassed 1 or 2 billion. Remove these technologies and mass starvation would consume Asia and the Third World. Mother Nature’s capacity was exceeded long ago. The questions now are how much bounty can advanced agricultural technology provide, at what cost, and who should bear those costs. The Progressive answer is that white people should die out in order to leave the planet to the rest of… Read more »

just stop subsidizing the 3rd world and its population will die back to a more sustainable level. its funny but europe has been sending huge amounts of food to the third world for decades, and caused a population bloom that is now engulfing europe!

Abortion, one-child policies, euthanasia, assisted suicide, forced sterilization, none of this has made a dent. After the will to survive, comes the will to procreate. These are basic drives and will never be thwarted. Nuclear winter? The earth will be teeming with humans in fifty years. Humans are the planet’s greatest resource. I love it when people talk about “limiting reproduction.” That’s code for playing God.

Humans have nearly gone extinct before. It can happen again. The will to procreate is not as big a thing as you think, every human society even Africa (very slowly) has lower fertility than a few decades ago. Any society developed past a certain point has below replacement fertility including an actual theocracy (Iran) and Brazil which used to be in crisis mode. Also there are quite a few scenarios that could result in sufficient die off that humans simply can’t live in large numbers. I’m not a Malthusian Green but there is such a thing as physical carrying capacity… Read more »

They are virtue signaling addicts in the hamster cage of spiritual materialism. Some of them will and have died trying to one-up each other, as shown on Me Tube. Political correctness is their pseudo morality, and they compete for the title of biggest victim in their no-boundary hagiography. The fall is hard-wired into every Eden and Grace is always within reach.

“Otherwise, a religion would be nothing more than man-made rules enforced by the strongest.” Which is, of course, the exact definition of islam. They don’t even pretend to have a hierarchy – just whomever the local imam says to kill gets killed.

They are laying the groundwork for forced sterilization. Some inmates in prisons are being offered early release in exchange for a free vasectomy. If the ACLU doth protest too much, the propaganda machine will soften the music to the same lyrics until enough of the population is desensitized enough to accept the eugenics. The Chinese are unencumbered by ethics, and are making some interesting inroads in gene editing. I suspect they are using prisoners for R&D. We should be paying attention to their next generation. Any government that can forcibly control the birth rate and has the ability to design… Read more »

“… the time between now and the end times would be one where the Church came to dominate the nations of the earth and usher in an era of peace, prosperity and righteousness, signally the return of Christ…”

“This is the problem that has haunted the Left in America. There’s no concept of good enough. They are always chanting, “we can do more” or “there is more work to do.” No matter how much damage they do in the holy cause, they are sure that more needs doing, more must be done”

This. This sums up everything that is wrong. No matter what anyone does, no one will ever be able to meet an ever-changing, ever-evolving standard of goodness.